During a women leaders’ networking event, a male senior executive was invited as a guest speaker. As he entered the board room, he looked at the twenty-odd women sitting around the table. He commented in a slightly nervous tone: “Oh my… I feel outnumbered.” The women looked at each other and laughed. For this man, being the only representative of his gender in a room was a novel experience. For most women in the room, it was a consistent experience throughout their careers in the technology domain.
Across the globe, the numbers show steady but slow progress in women’s participation in the tech industry. Significant discrepancies come into notice when looking at individual countries. In the UK the percentage of women in the IT workforce is less than 20% and this figure has not changed in the last ten years. When looking at senior positions, the representation of women drops dramatically, to just 10%. EU countries report similar numbers. The US have better results. According to self-reported data women represent around 24% of the technical workforce at Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Facebook. And the overall number across the tech industry was around 29% in 2020. This is significant progress from just 8% in 1970 but very slow considering fifty years have passed.
India is doing comparatively better. Large technology service providers like Wipro, Tech Mahindra, Infosys or TCS report around 30% of women in their workforce. They have shared plans to increase the proportion to 45% to 50% by actively hiring women. The percentage of female engineering students is one of the highest in the world, around 30%. But the majority of women tech workers are below 30 and unmarried, and a large chunk exits the industry after just five years of career.
Continue reading: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/voices/the-unstoppable-growth-of-women-in-technology/
Across the globe, the numbers show steady but slow progress in women’s participation in the tech industry. Significant discrepancies come into notice when looking at individual countries. In the UK the percentage of women in the IT workforce is less than 20% and this figure has not changed in the last ten years. When looking at senior positions, the representation of women drops dramatically, to just 10%. EU countries report similar numbers. The US have better results. According to self-reported data women represent around 24% of the technical workforce at Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Facebook. And the overall number across the tech industry was around 29% in 2020. This is significant progress from just 8% in 1970 but very slow considering fifty years have passed.
India is doing comparatively better. Large technology service providers like Wipro, Tech Mahindra, Infosys or TCS report around 30% of women in their workforce. They have shared plans to increase the proportion to 45% to 50% by actively hiring women. The percentage of female engineering students is one of the highest in the world, around 30%. But the majority of women tech workers are below 30 and unmarried, and a large chunk exits the industry after just five years of career.
Continue reading: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/voices/the-unstoppable-growth-of-women-in-technology/
